Paige Birgfeld, 34, missing mother of three in Grand Junction, Co. lead a double-life, also working for an escort service.

The distinguished looking gentleman wearing a red leather sports jacket was standing shoulder to shoulder with me at the high-energy political event at a Denver lumber warehouse on March 1.

We were just below the raised platform where in a minute or two Republican Congressman Cory Gardner was expected to formally announce his candidacy against incumbent Democrat Sen. Mark Udall for the U.S. Senate.

I didn’t feel very comfortable covering an important political event like this, as The Denver Post’s Lynn Bartels had plainly recognized a few minutes earlier.

I normally cover the crime beat and all that that entails: attending numerous court hearings, going to murder scenes and interviewing people while standing behind yellow crime tape. Although politics seemed like another world to me, I worked on Saturdays and sometimes I had to cover events like this one.

Bartels, the newspaper’s political reporter, wove her way through the crowd and found me as I was wandering around the cavernous lumber warehouse.

She graciously began introducing me to several people including Congressman Mike Coffman and some Colorado businessmen who were movers and shakers in the Republican party. She seemed to know half the people in the crowd.

But then she scrambled back to her laptop to tap out a blog describing the scene and I had inched my way up to the front of the crowd so I could be in a good spot for the speech.

While I was fumbling with my cellular phone – rehearsing how to record the press conference – the silver-haired gentleman spoke to me in a rather abrupt way.

“So could you just tell me, who is going to turn out the lights when the last reporter leaves The Denver Post?”

Regarding name association, my first impression of the story title, ‘soccer mom’. . . is the first campaign of Bill Clinton, where that demographic term was invented to lure a certain type of woman to vote for the hunk that would protect them. Bill Clinton of all people, appealing to woman to protect! It has to be one of the biggest scams in political history.

But then it took me 2 pages to unwind Cory Gardner from the disappearance of this woman. I will admit though, reporting this story 4 months after it happened, is certainly better than running it on election eve. You know, name association and all.

Since you recall the soccer mom-thingy, you may also recall some lefties in the media who insisted at the time that all American women owed it to Bill Clinton to fall on their knees and service him in thanks for protecting abortion.

And regarding Mr. Gardner, it has probably occurred to you that the DP loathes him and will go to whatever lengths are required to destroy him and promote Mark Udall.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.